The little one died when I did a water change from the big tank in preparation to move it. I bought some more eggs, a pack of about 30 and decided to hatch them in the bigger tank again. I had maybe 5 hatch and they all died inside a week. That's 3 failures in a row.

I'm now thinking; this tank I'm using was owned by fish novices and the water was like pea soup when I came round and rescued their barbs. They quite probably put in an algae killer at some point to try to clean it up or even snail killer as they had some green mush in the tank that may have once been plants too. These things often contain copper in which case up I'm right up the spout trying to use this tank for triops. It would explain the appalling hatch and survival rates. Perhaps I'll try killifish but not at the moment.

Work has been killing me, while trying to do this several new projects have turned up and thanks to this and a primary server going knockers up I've been regularly working 8am to 6pm then 10pm to 2am during the week and then 8am to 4pm Sunday. This has effected both my enjoyment of the tanks and my sense of humour.

So I get home last Friday and found Dory had a serious fungal infection that wasn't there the night before. Looks like she banged her head and got an infection. Now Dory is not a fish that enjoys attention and the only way I could catch her is to strip the tank and drain it to 6" of water. (had to do it before) Even then it would be difficult. I really couldn't face the destruction and wasn't convinced that it was a good idea considering my tank is FOWLR (and a few soft corals more or less thrown in.) So I picked up my invert friendly, "reef safe", oodinex, turned off the carbon and UV and dosed accordingly.

Instantly the mushrooms shrivelled, the cowrie hid and the torch coral disintegrated (although the torch has been on its way out for months now). 3 days of this and the mushrooms appear to be recovering, the cowrie is unhappy but alive and I no longer have a flatworm problem. Better still Dory is improved but this was a very dramatic example of what 'reef safe' actually means. Terrible. I need to get things back in control and I need to find and train someone to look after all these fish for me because next year I'm going to Florida for 3 weeks.

As you can imagine with all this and 2 kids that are currently 'testing boundaries' I've taken the only sensible course of action with the triop project... I give up.

Last time I posted I was waiting for my triops in my triop kit to hatch. They never did - that I saw but I learned a couple of things.
First I was over complicating the whole thing. Triops need a very low TDS to hatch which means that cycling the tank before they hatch is near impossible. Plus when they hatch they are so small that having a cycled tank is pointless anyway. Their bioload is so tiny that even in a pint glass it would be like a single tetra in a 50 gallon tank. In a 30L tank all they really needed was to be left alone.
Anyway, that was a learning experience so I ordered some new eggs from ebay and got the european species "cancriformis" that is more comfortable with lower temperatures and grows larger.
I set up a bowl on top of the tank with a light and put in mostly pure RO with a small jug full of old tank water from the tropical tank. Left it a day and then poured in the new eggs.

A week later some triops where born, last week I thought they'd all died before growing.
This was followed by the growing on tank becoming overgrown with algae and last weekend by my marine tank sump return malfuctioning and 30 gallons of water ending up on the dining room floor. The fish are ok but the Cowrie hasn't moved since so I need to go check him out as soon as I've finished typing this... tomorrow I'm fitting a new laminate floor (the tank itself is mounted directly onto the concrete so at least I don't have to get under it!

Overall I've been feeling pretty fed up about all this but just this afternoon as I was about to tip out the grotty bowl of water I spotted a 0.5cm triop lazing at the surface. Some good news at last
The newborns where smaller than the sand at the bottom of the bowl and so despite my best efforts proved impossible to photograph. Actually I do have some images with tiny white specs on them that may be the baby triops but here is a photo of the 0.5cm one today.

I put the adding of triops on hold as I wanted to run some chemistry experiments on the tank first. Results on those still to follow but I've done a few water changes and the water is now clear.

I have found that the exceptionally soft water required for the triops is resulting in difficult keeping the PH from crashing. With the additional chemical activity of the plants and the ammonia starting a cycle the ph drops low, the cycle stalls and it all goes pete tong. Lucky this is all being discovered before adding the triops. To counter this I have chosen to increase the KH and TDS of the tank a little. I am now holding a PH of 6.4 - 6.6 and a TDS of close to 200.

To answer a couple of questions posed on the last blog entry,

1. I have some egg cysts left over from a couple of years ago, I know they are good at surviving drought (~sp.) but do you think they would still be viable?
Triop eggs are amazingly resilient and can be viable after decades. It will depend on how they've been kept, hopefully dry and cool. The only way to know is to try it out.

2. How big do they get?
That depends on the particular species of Triop. I've been told Triops inhabit every continent and climate, the largest being the european (Triops cancriformis) and grow to over 4" plus tail. The UK has triops however they are an endangered species so collecting from the wild is a definite no-no. Normally the ones you get in kits are from one of a few species that grow to around 2" (plus tail). Once you learn the species names ebay makes it easy to get the ones you're after.


I promise there will be triops in the next instalment of this triop blog!

Hello again,
I've not blogged anything for a while but I have a new project on the go now. Triops! I know this is a fishkeeping website but triop care isn't that different and so here is FK's first triop blog and rough guide.

The story so far...
I never had triops as a kid and have always been fascinated by the weird and wonderful so last Christmas my wife surprised me with a box called Triop World. Billing itself and everything I would need to keep triops it contained a pamphlet, a clear plastic yoghurt pot (maybe 500ml) and a three sachets.
The sachets turned out to be one of sand - about 50g. One of food, looks like standard fish feed pellets, and one of eggs and food.

The instructions tell you to fill the pot with bottled water (because chlorine and chloride are not liked by triops)
Wait until the water is at room temperature then add the eggs. Feed daily. Add the sand after three weeks. Do a partial water change every two weeks.

I decided to do some online research and found that most of this was pandering to the "make it easy or people wont buy it" line of thinking .

With the assistance of sites like http://mytriops.com and a few others that I can't find any more I learned that what I really wanted was a small aquarium of 4L per adult triop. A filter that would be considered safe for fry and somewhere to put it.

My credit with the wife had all but expired so rather than spending money I got on with redecorating the living room and fitting a 47" HD LCD to the wall. This pleased the wife but left an awkward empty gap next to the sofa... what would we put there?

A visit to Ikea saw the purchase of a sturdy chest of drawers which we could keep the remote controls and game controllers in... something tells me that if you need a chest of drawers for your remote controls technology really has taken over your life!

During this time my daughter made a new friend, when her parents came round they spotted the multiple tanks and asked if I would take theirs off their hands as they'd lost patience and where feeling guilty about the fish. These guys:-



Seen here fully recovered in my tank they where sadly homed in a 30L mess that was opaque with blackish slime algae. The filter had broken months before, several dead fish kept them company and the water was so murky I couldn't tell what they where until after I'd bagged them up, even then their poor frail bodies made them hard to identify.

The good news is that these poor little fishies are now much happier in my 220L planted tank and I have a 30L tank hood and light.

Thanks to work hours giving me no time at all to go round the lfs it took me ages to then find that none of the lfs sell a simple sponge filter. I bought an Eheim Pickup 2008 and stretched the toe of some tights over the inlet strainer.

It took another week to get back to a lfs that sold sand, maidenhead wanted £25 for a 25kg bag of sand. Not impressed guys. I rode the extra 50 yards to Wydales garden center and collected a 25kg bag of playsand instead for £3.99. Same stuff minus the little fishies on the bag! Seriously, what a racket.


Rinsed the sand, filled the tank with RO and a dash of tap/remineraliser making the TDS around 80ppm. Triops like very soft water and they spawn in fresh rainfall. Dropped in a couple of bits of bogwood that I had lying around too. Now when it clears I'll add the plants.



So that's it. Thanks for reading and now we are up to date I'll try to be a little more concise next time

Hi guys,
Things are still going well. Maintenance is manageable again and touch wood the tank is healthy. Nitrates went up suddenly right before the puffer went in. Up to 20ppm. Not sure exactly what happened there but they're back down to zero again. I've learned about ionic balance and all the parameters are being kept right spot on what I want without problems. One help was using kalkwasser for top ups, this maintained the KH and PH. Another was the TMC calcium, possibly because it also contains organic carbon which I don't really understand very much but read something about it when I looked up "vodka dosing" and seems to be to do with redox.... whatever it is, since the TMC Calcium and the kalkwasser things have been a lot stabler between water changes. oh, I also swapped the 80W T5 on the sump for 11W and the algae is growing properly now.

Behaviour wise there have been a few surprises, first Lenny the Algae Blennie has quite an attitude. Often biting my hand when I reach in to refresh the algae on the clip but also taking the occasional peck at the puffer. The puffer doesn't appear to notice or mind and that's another surprise. I was expecting a little bit of carnage when he went in there. Realising that my corals, crabs and snails where all at risk but also being advised by LHG that the puffer may turn on the fish was a bit of a worry. I know its early days but currently he's not showing any signs of being a threat. Quite the opposite in fact which is a little concerning. I noticed the night before last that his tail was a little frayed. Nothing severe but not right.
Several hours of tank watching later and eventually last night I see the culprit. While the puffer hides in a cave most of the day he is looking out the front of the tank in the evenings and early mornings and occasionally Dory (the cowardly regal tang) will bite his tail.
This is a problem, partly because its stressing and damaging the puffer although he seems not to worry too much but also because if he does decide to retaliate it would probably be the end of Dory. Not sure what to do about this but if it doesn't stop then I guess one of them is going to have to be rehomed.
Another surprise was the puffers swimming ability, daft really seeing as its a fish but I've always read they're such poor swimmers that flow should be kept down at least for part of the tank. Looking at him, well to put it delicately he's not the most streamlined of creatures is he? Yet, I've held his food directly in front of a 3000lph powerhead and he wasn't phased by it in the slightest. Watching him he swims ... well, like a fish, more or less. Actually its more like some sort of mutant underwater hummingbird but effective enough that he can keep pace with dory when there is food at the far end of the tank.

As for being messy eaters... wow, aren't they just. He'll take half a North Atlantic prawn in one and then clouds bellow out his gills making the entire tank into a snow storm. It's an unbelievably quick and effective way of getting shredded prawn into every corner of the tank.



Devil's Fingers, relocated after being attacked one night - before puffers arrival. Was that Dory the regal tang or Fozzie the teddy bear crab? Fozzie got the blame but since then I've placed a new peice of live rock where it was and seen dory smack the rock around with her tail obviously very offended at its existence.




Still like the mushrooms, cant get over how much they flouress under the moonlights. They've grown well... will they spread off their rock naturally, or is this as far as they go without human interferance?



Decided to try a Xenia, thought it might have been a huge mistake as it was going in only days before the puffer. It's doing quite well though and I'm hoping it will start to spread up the rock its next to.



Dory and "the puffer", I've been calling him "the puffer" in this post because we are still arguing about a name. My wife wants to call him Beaky, the kids want to call him Porky or Bloat and I've started calling him Puffy which we all think is a really bad name, but it seems to have stuck.



An overview of the tank, a little too much algae but I did say there was a small nitrate spike and I wanted to keep Lenny well fed, now he seems to only want to eat from the clip so its not going down very quickly!

So what where my targets... fish only tank with live rock and all for under £100. I've probably spent closer to £4000 over the last year and I've got a reef tank all be it a light on corals. I've had lots of bright ideas and most of them have cost me a considerable amount of time and money. I've learned loads and love my tank, not because its the best (obviously its not) but because its all mine, mistakes and all.

That brings this series of blogs to a close. No doubt I'll post more about my tanks development but from initial half-baked design through complete failure of budget and finally to half-baked completion this is my tank.

So, what's the next plan? Well, actually I want to put a 5' tank in the living room to replace this one but the sump will stay in the dining room. That's some way off though as I need to recover my credit , with the bank and the wife!

ok, its been a over month since the last blog. I suppose you're all wondering how things are going? No? Just glad I shut up for 5 weeks perhaps?

Well, lets see... no more deaths and no further signs of illness. Thats a bonus. Dory is making a recovery after treatment with metronidazole for hexamita (causing HLLE) which seems the last of her ailments. Fingers crossed, and thats not far short of miraculous.

While I was waiting for the meds I rebuilt the sump baffles from glass. Word of advice, get the glass cut 2mm shorter than you need to allow for exansion and dodgey glaziers' measures. It all fits, water tight and works like a dream. The biggest problem was the drain down to the display tank as it was dragging in air bubbles. I fixed this eventually with a sealed standpipe and a hole drilled to an exact measurement to allow just enough water to flow down the pipe when there is 4cm of water pressure on it. No space for air to get in. This is balanced against the inlet flow from the pump. The joys of an overhead sump

Good news is its been tested and cross tested and the flow rate through the hole increases as the water builds up even by a few cm so it wont overflow (yes, I am touching that wood again). If I was to design the sump again I'd place two drains, one for emergency overflow.

I added a TMC V2-800 skimmer as planned. Had to buy it new though. That draws from the last chamber and delivers to the first adding another 2800lph of flow over the mudbed. Oh yes, I bought nearly £100 of mud too for the main section at the back. Mineral mud and some of the kent biosediment stuff too that was on special. Topped off with a little live sand. You can see in the picture I've used masking tape to mark the acceptable high and low water levels as an early alert should flow in one section change at any point.


I also replaced the main pump for an eheim of slightly higher power and placed it inside an eggcrate box so it could be well hidden under the rocks without getting blocked.


The UV has returned to the display tank with Dory. This pumps from the last section to the 3rd.

Yes that right, Dory is back in the display tank! The humbug damsels remain in quarantine for now.

Other additions are nightlights from ebay:

and you might be able to spot an "Encrusting Leather" Coral which was bought today.


Still to do... I still have more algae than I want, both cyno and hairy so a DIY phosphate reactor is on the cards and I'm playing with the direction of the powerheads. I want to remake the facia of the cabinet for easier access without unscrewing the doors, which should be straight forward enough.

Over the next 4 weeks I need to decide on the humbugs. Then they either go back into the tank or returned to the store.

Wow, well after 2 months of disaster I now have the surviving fish in quarantine.

Lesson learned - ALL fish need to be quarantined and clear of disease for at least 2 months prior to introducing to the main tank.

I have 5 humbug damsels and the regal tang left. All the others are dead mainly thanks to Brooklynella. The main tank has to remain isolated from fish systems (and water from fish systems) for 2 months to rid all traces of the parasite. Getting the fish out of the display tank required that I drain it and take all the live rock out essentailly destroying the first 3 months of work. All for the sake of proper quarantine.

I added some more cerith snails and hermit crabs to the tank and then began its isolation. At this rate it will be May before it has fish again.
I also drained the sump, cut out all the baffles and redesigned the layout.


Being nearly all the way back to square one after trying so hard and having only a £100 of dead fish to show for it is devistating, depressing, demoralising and heart rending. Right now if I was able to take it all back to August I'd have used the tank for the goldfish, or not bought it at all.

Hopefully things will be brighter next time.

I started the last blog with the daft words "its all been going well". you may have noticed that I didn't follow up with the photos in October like I promised. I'm afraid things went rapidly pair shaped and my learning took a steeper curve than I would have liked.

I replaced all the pipes for solid and got the water to full seawater salinity. Then I added my first marine fish. The Regal Tang. I got a little carried away though and messed up I'm afraid breaking several of the most basic fishkeeping rules.
RULE 1. If there is a sick fish in the same water system, walk away
The tang was in with another fish that had what appeared to be a small fungal infection on the fin. The LFS owner assured me it was just a bite and definately not infectious in any way.
RULE 2. If in doubt, walk away
I had doubts but I took the tang anyway.
RULE 3. Never ever, ever, at all, ever buy on impulse.
As the owner was with another customer I spent a little time looking around the tanks and then spotted the most gorgeous little blennie. It found its way into one of the bags last order but they couldn't figure out what it was so they had an 'unknown blennie' that would 'probably scavange' and bought him. Now they did offer to take him back if it turned out I couldn't cope with him but really I should have been more careful.

Within a few days Dory came out with a fungal infection, nothing too severe and just a short course of meds sorted her out. In the mean time I discovered that my blennie was a scooter blennie and was eating well.

I'd gotten away with it! Over the next few weeks I noticed that the bubbles from where the sump drains to the main tank where staying suspended in the water. This made the water look cloudy when it was not and also I have read can irritate the fish. I cut the end off Dory's old bag and attached it over the end of the pipe which gave a substancial improvement. Not too pretty but effective. In the mean time though the sump was getting very gunked up with microalgae and slim and keeping the refugium clean was a twice daily job.

Soldiering on I made my next mistake. A few weeks later I purchased 6 Humbug Damsels and 2 clowns to go in the tank. I placed them in quarantine and after a week of good health the clowns went into general population and 4-5 days later the damsels followed. For future reference, all fish should be quarantined 60 days and treated with copper based medications to kill all parasites before they go into the main tank.

The mollies by this time had become a problem. They continued to breed even after the male was removed they where causing chaos and going to overrun the filtration system if left to it. They also seemed to be less happy eating marine food and I couldn't feed them tropical foods and the rest of the fish marine so I made the descision to remove the mollies to quarantine and slowly aclimitise them back to freshwater. It took me a few days to get the mollies out of the tank and two still remain, one that is too subborn and another thats grown up in the sump and hides between all the rocks.

By this time the real problems had shown up. White Spot.

More mistakes follow, in trying to deal with the white spot without using copper and killing all my inverts I tried reef safe medications. It was not entirely effective so I thought I'd help it with a cleaner goby. This doesn't work btw and introducing a cleaner goby without quarantine was one of the stupidest things I've done this year.

Now I've added UV and I am continuing to fight the White Spot with invert safe medications but I know deep down there is only one cure. I have to re-quarantine all my fish, in one batch and treat them with proper medications. In the mean time the UV and medications should keep things at bay until the new year.

Here's the pics:



The sump, dirty but now with a UV filter on top of the lighting bracket. Also tidied up the pipework and wires.


Mangrove : slowest growing plant in the known universe!


Just being near to salt water left its mark on these hinges in a matter of weeks!


So I made a perspex condensation cover. Much better. The sump is still open and evaporation is at about 2L per day.


Improved, if a little bodged.


Microbubbles sorted.


Dory today, white spot at bay but not looking healthy at all


The originally named, Nemo. A common clown, tank bred.


An overview of the display tank as it stands today.

oh, one final other change... I moved the webcam much close to the tank. Happy viewing


Thats all for now, more in the new year. Happy Christmas all.

Well its been a month and its all been going well. The mollies are multiplying like nobodies business the water quality is great and the salinity is up to 1.015 by simply replacing the evaporated water with water at 1.050. Water changes I've been doing with water at 1.025ish

I'm not being too fastidious about getting the salinity right on the change water because at the end of the day I want the salinity up quite a bit in my tank and changing 40L in a tank of about 600L only makes a small difference.

Mainly I been using this time to get used to the tank and check everything works.

Problems?
Well algae is rife. I left the lights on for a week and the wife dumped too much food in the tank while I was working late one day. Plus I left the refugium light on for a few weeks with no plants.. that didn 't help!

Baby mollies found their way through the pump and ended up in the overhead sump. No problem there but I had to make sure it was safe for them. Plenty to eat thanks to all that algae!

I've just moved the drain from the overhead sump so its more direct as it was reducing access to the right hand side of the tank quite a bit making water changes hard.

During this I noticed that the flexible pipe from the strainer to the pump had collapsed under suction. This is something I hadn't considered. Stupid really, the pipe is designed to work with the presure of water running down to the pump then the pump pushes the water up the other side. While I am using it to suck the water up to the top the water has to be under low pressure so a non-reinforced flexible pipe is bound to collapse.

While water is still flowing the rate must be reduced so at the weekend I have to replace all the pipe with solid. Unfortunately its a right pain to get to the pump itself but I guess I'll just have to cope.

So a few pitfalls to this idea so far but given the space I've got under the unit to store all the extras I'm still happy.

At the current rate the water should be at sea water strength in about 3 weeks and then I'll be able to add live rock, live sand and that macro algae for the sump that I keep forgetting the name of!

After that some cleaners will move in and eventually the puffer fish shall arrive.

No new photos just at the moment but at the beggining of October expect loads!
For now though I'm going to have to get my plumbing fixed.

So how hard can it be to build a glass box?

Actually its not that bad at all provided you follow a few simple rules.
1. Get a professional to cut the glass.
2. Get prepared.
3. Be safe.

So after an extended wait I collected the glass from the local glass cutter. I decided on 10mm glass to make the build easier to work with and structurely stronger. The base was 120cm x 50cm with a hole cut on one corner for the drain. The sides where 23cm tall and measured to sit on top of the base. In addition a single 10cm wide brace was also included. The glass for this came to £100.

Step 1.

Before putting the glass together rub down every edge with and emery pad to remove sharp edges. Wear gloves and wipe the edges over with a damp cloth to remove the dust.

Step 2.

Lay out the peices as they are to connect. Double check that you've got them the right way round and that the edges are clean and smooth.

Step 3.

Place tags of duct tape all around the base. Place the sides on top and tape them in place then pull them back and lay them out as shown. Get a dozen tags of tape ready for the next step.


Step 4.

Run a solid line of sealant around the base and on the joining corner edges one at a time lift the peices into place. Use the precut bits of tape to hold the corners in place. In this picture you can see I used my old 10L tank to support the center brace. After everything was in place a gloved finger was used to squeeze the sealant back into the cracks and wipe away the excess. Just like using bathroom sealant you wipe once with your index finger dont worry about smears and smudges once dry these can be trimmed off with a craft knife blade.

Step 5.

Now I'd worked out exactly how I wanted to divide this tank into a sump and buoght a large sheet of 2mm acrylic from the local DIY store to accomodate my wishes. Cutting acrylic is a bit like cutting tiles. You score a line then break it over a brace. This works very neatly for short cuts but for very long cuts it tends to go off course. Luckily this is a sump and the divisions didn't need to be that neat. Plus I had lots of spare acrylic.

Step 6.

Once the basic divisions had been cut I took various sections to the router. I marked up lines on masking tape to ensure that the cuts where even and consistant.

Step 7.

Here it is, the completed sump. The Acrylic was equally hard to glue to the glass and much tape was used to hold it in position while the sealants set. I've marked out the sections to explain the function of the sump.

1. Water comes in from the main tank in this section the pipe leads it to the base of section 1 which is filled with very course grade foam to filter out any large debris.
2. From the entrance area the water flows over to this section which is filled with about 12kg of live rock. Flowing from the top to the bottom then into:
3. This section will be filled with plants/algae to use up excess nutrients. Flowing from the bottom up to:
4. A large section for all the equipment. Currently just homing a heater.
5. A long narrow section to provide a cosmetic facia but also home live rock and inverts safely.
6. This large section is for wool to fine filter the water prior to its return to the tank
7. This section is for the standpipe. I had to play about with the height and design of the standpipe to get it just right but I think I'm close now.

I added a inline pump which sits behind the sump to draw water up into it and a non return valve to allow the pump to be primed and not backsyphon in the event of a power cut.
I used various odds and ends of plastic piping to connect it all together plus a few trips to B&Q. So far, so good.